Censorship, apathy, and free thinking or lack thereof...

 

Above is a slide show that Chinese blogger Isaac Mao created last year to illustrate his belief that free speech is not truly possible without free thinking.  Social norms, politics, religion, fear, and prior knowledge, he believes, all block our ability to think freely. I would add that nationalism further blocks the ability of people everywhere to think freely - and that goes for Americans or any other nationality. Not just Chinese people or other people living under non-democratic governments by any means. 

Ann Condi's recent post at Danwei.org is a clear illustration of Isaac's point. It is also a reminder that apathy and pride are a strong complement to censorship in preventing the emergence of a free political discourse in China. She describes how she showed some Chinese colleagues a website that they could use to circumvent Internet censorship, and was greeted with overwhelming lack of interest. She then concludes: "What Internet activism there may be in China, it is not coming from the upwardly-mobile Chinese white-collar workers. One sometimes wonders why the government bothers to censor the Internet at all." I won't excerpt her post in further detail here because you need to go there and read the whole thing. 

This is exactly why people who think that the Internet - merely by virtue of existing in China - is going to bring significant political change any time in the near future are smoking something pretty good. At the beginning of this year I wrote an academic book chapter examining why this is in a bit more detail. You can get a draft PDF here. [UPDATE: the link is now working - sorry it wasn't earlier today! ] (Unfortunately academic publishers are so slow, the book hasn't come out yet, but they claim it will eventually..)

Condi's post also reminds me of a blog post written by my friend Nina Wu when her brother Hao was held in detention by Chinese police for nearly half a year without charges or access to a lawyer:

After Haozi disappeared, browsing the Internet and searching for related information became a mandatory daily class.  I have googled a great deal of information on “Hao Wu,” but I can’t visit many of the search results, especially addresses with .org suffixes.  Eight or nine out of ten will return “Impossible to display this webpage.”  I don’t know what kind of sensitive information these websites contain.  Before, I did not believe in “Internet censorship.”  This was because I used to visit mostly finance and investment websites, which rarely have problems.  Only when I faced a serious predicament did I discover that this was a real problem.

Last year on Global Voices, when I asked Chinese bloggers how many people they know regularly use proxy servers to get around Internet blocks, most answers reflected my own impression which is that very few people bother - and that the percentage is likely in the single digits. A 2005 survey of Chinese Internet use in five cities (PDF) asked respondents whether they use proxy servers to circumvent censorship and got the following response:  “never”: 71.2 percent; “seldom”: 19.7 percent; “sometimes”: 5.9 percent; “often”: 2.5 percent.

It's true that China's Internet censorship is a "failure" in the sense that there is always some technical way around it if you try. However, most people don't try. They aren't interested in trying, or don't realize the extent to which their information environment has been warped in the first place, and thus have no idea what they're missing by not trying, or they're not interested in being made uncomfortable by certain kinds of information. Thus you could make the case that censorship when combined with apathy, nationalism, and a bit of fear here and there, is actually very successful.

Reacting to Condi's post, Andrew Lih and Ethan Zuckerman are both concerned that apathy is not taken sufficiently into account by most international human rights and free speech activists. Andrew asks: "would life without censorship necessarily “free” Chinese minds? Would they start clamoring for the truth?" As Ethan puts it: "While Internet users in China may lack access to some topics, Internet users in the US often lack interest in topics, a barrier that’s just as difficult to permeate in ensuring that topics enter the popular consciousness."

Some facts about your government's behavior can often make you feel uncomfortable and ashamed - feelings that nobody likes to have. Better just to avoid those facts so that you feel happy and proud to be American, if you're American; or happy and proud to be Chinese, if you're Chinese. Ethan and Andrew agree that we need to acknowledge how apathy creates a less-than-freethinking environment even in ostensibly democratic countries like the U.S. - despite the fact that the government is not systematically or formally censoring the Internet and news media.  This is reinforced by a commercial news environment that tries hard to give audiences what it believes they want in order to stay in business.

I agree it is arrogant to act like we live in an ideal free speech environment and that we don't have a lot of work to do at home in order to have a truly healthy democratic discourse. On the other hand, standing back and saying nothing while Western companies contribute to Chinese Internet censorship isn't acceptable to me either. Companies need to stop using the excuse that effectively says "the Internet will make them free in the long run so it doesn't matter so much what we do in the short run."  But meanwhile Americans should not act as if our own country is some kind of free speech gold standard - as, unfortunately, some people especially in Washington have been prone to do. Such attitudes make those Chinese Internet users who were predisposed to nationalism and apathy even less inclined to take outside reports of Chinese Internet censorship seriously, because they perceive that these reports are part of a big nationalistic argument about who is better than whom. We need a discourse about these issues that gets beyond nationalism, ideology, catch-phrases and over-simplifications on all sides - somehow.

Comments

[Matteo Mohorovicich]

Interesting matter, especially when you talk about apathy as something to ease the spreading of online censorship. Personally I agree, but even aknowledge Western companies are accountable for the Internet blocking or filtering in China. As you suggest, a proficient and beyond ideology public opionion is needed to face such issues.

[Michael Turton]

Interesting....here in Taiwan, where a Chinese society has gone a long way down the free speech path, foreigners often claim the level of critical thinking is low.

I don't think the problem lies in free speech and critical thinking, but rather in the habit of deference to large institutions and corporate authority that continues even after the ending speech limits, and also, the lack of a robust cultural template for free speech heroism. "Free speech" often represents a loss of face in Chinese culture that all find intolerable -- so not only is there less of what westerners see as critical thinking, but there is less direct expression of opinion even in private conversation. Personally I think cultural habits of giving and receiving personal expression, and their cultural frameworks, are more critical than "apathy" (which is a symptom or consequence and not a driver of behavior). Chinese, essentially, are already in the habit of censoring themselves out of long-established habits of deference to authority.

Michael

[Charles Liu]

So what kept all you "Free Hao Wu" crowd from blogging about America's own Hao Wu, Josh Wolf?

And folks like me are sitting at home, not kowing about Josh Wolf because media is silent and you people are not blogging about him.

What gives?